Common Sense

Invited Distinguished Professor:

Patrick Danahy

 

Gabriel Esquivel,  Studio Professor

Teaching Assistant: Shane Bugni.

Texas A&M University

 

Team: Melanie Guertrero, Jane Goodman. Ekaansh Karla and Nate Sorensen.

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This project explores the interaction between human and non-human agencies. These agents interpret their respective environments differently. The human agency perceives elements through a cultural and social lens, identifying elements of the assembly through familiarity. The non-human agency, the artificial intelligence, is incapable of understanding any imbued symbolism and focuses on interpreting the material and composition in a more methodical way. While the AI does have an input of intentional bias, it's based on a convolutionary layered relationship, where it derives and synthesizes relationships based on materiality. Due to their distinct goals and interpretations, when forced to collide and confront each other, they create an autonomous reaction: a metamorphic field of perception, which is visually represented through the leakage.

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There are various perceptions of this collision: solidified, gaseous and liquified states. The constantly changing and adapting substance erodes, creates, and defines spaces. These repurposed interior spaces actualize the AI's ability to analyze, organize and store algorithmic patterns from its understanding of industrial materiality. After the AI studies the material, and has no need for it, the excess debris is discarded from the industrial artifact and is stored in a data archive (the ground). The colliding and fluctuating enigma explores and bridges both perceptions together through its very nature.

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Before the expansion of the AI in the Industrial assemblage, the fixed mechanical system existed as a means of profit and need. However, when the AI took control and observed these fixtures, it broke the linear timeline of production and instead viewed these mechanical systems as adaptable and complex entanglements. The AI utilizes the arrangement as a means of transportation. This fixture changes and adapts to the specific material it is studying and the output it produces.

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These processes throughout the assemblage emphasize the contingent nature of the part to part relationship; instead of the conventional mechanical causation, where similar causes lead to similar effects each time, there are cases within the artifact where perceived causes lead to different effects or perceived effects can come before the causes. Graham Harman talks about a similar perspective as he analyzes DeLanda's ontology: assemblage and realism, in which he describes Delanda's argument for his catalysis against the doctrine of mechanical causation. Similarly, the ambiguous relationship between both the liquid and solidified leakage can lead to various conclusions about the timing of the events. These processes are not part of a linear timeline; rather, they are events that intermix, collide and overlap. Overall, the assemblage is not a sovereign collection but a network filled with complex interrelationships between the realms of human and machine actants.

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